Thursday, October 16, 2008

Hack The Debate

I actually came across this show called Hack The Debate (on Al Gore's Current TV channel) during the VP debate, and for inexcusable reasons failed to blog about it sooner, but I figured it's better late than never, right?

Anyway, the idea behind Hack The Debate is that during the live debate, Twitter users send in tweets which are then displayed at the bottom of the screen in real-time, under the talking heads of the candidates.

How cool is that? I found it fascinating.

It's like watching the debate with a couple dozen of your snarkiest friends. Well, some of the comments were kinda dumb and/or obvious, but some were pretty doggone insightful and funny. For example, this is where I first encountered the name "Caribou Barbie" (and they weren't talking about Senator Biden).

And on a completely different topic, what's the implication of sites like Twitter and Current doing away with the "www" part of their URL? Their addresses are simply twitter.com and current.com - no www needed. Is this a new way to indicate you're an insider, a cutting-edge netizen who's too cool for the dub-dub-dub? (and does anyone even say netizen anymore?). Or is it simply a recent realization that if every address begins with www, then we don't really need to use it anywhere?

I'd like to think I'm keeping up with this whole interweb thing, but gosh, there's a lot to keep up with!

Yah....maybe a little behind. I'd noticed that many companies, orgs, or whatever find it easier to use when placing the website on the sides of vehicles buildings or whatever. I mean, even if you're not sure, your going to naturally add www to the prefix. In fact, if you type any address minus the www into the address bar of your browser, it automatically goes to the www version. Right? I'm gonna try right now.